K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Carving up the corpse of Fluxbuntu

I’ve never been a big Fluxbox fan; my allegiance fell to the side of Openbox, and even today that’s where I find myself most at home. On the other hand, a thread on the Ubuntu forums the other day brought Fluxbuntu back to mind, which reminded me of the only Fluxbox desktop I ever really cared for, aesthetically speaking.

To me, that’s a rather pleasant Fluxbox arrangement, if for no other reason than it doesn’t look like an exploding star. Sometimes it seems like every Fluxbox fan is trying to out-sci-fi the others.

Those are the original styles and icon themes from the Fluxbuntu 7.10 alternate ISO, which is still available from the site’s home page. If you want to carve those out of the ISO, mount it to your system like this:

mount -t iso9660 -o loop fluxbuntu-7.10-installer-i386.iso /mnt

From there, you can dredge out the original deb packages in /mnt/pool/main/, with the bulk of the cool stuff in the /f/ sub-folder. Look for fluxbuntu-artwork, fluxbuntu-default-settings and fluxbuntu-meta, and probably fluxconf can’t hurt. In the /g/ folder copy out gtk2-engines-salsa, and from /s/ the salsa-icon-theme folder.

If you’re running Ubuntu you can probably just install Fluxbox and then force dpkg to install those deb files and start it up. If you’re using Arch, grab the deb2targz tool out of the repositories, transmogrify each one of those debs into tar.gz files, then extract them to your root directory — the file structure will drop them perfectly into place. Probably most other distros could follow that same route, and get these same results.

I didn’t put the desktop icons on my system, mostly because it’s more work than it’s worth for me. And you’ll still have to manage the right-click menu to put the programs you want in your system. I like looking at PCManFM if I am going to have that green theme going, but you’re free to experiment.

To close, it’s a bit of a shame that the Fluxbuntu project sputtered and died. It had a quick, short run and was becoming quite popular before it melted away into dust. Kind of like an exploding star. ;)

P.S.: Bonus! If you check out the Launchpad pages for fluxbuntu-design, you’ll find a wallpaper there that approaches the same theme, but is slightly different. Unreleased mystery wallpaper? Who knows. Worth a look, either way. …

Fluxbuntu was my second ubuntu-family install and the first one that actually broke the cycle of Windows re-installs after playing around. I have since gone back through mainline Ubuntu, Arch+Openbox, and more recently SLiTAZ (after hdd died on Arch box) – but might never have left Fluxy if it had continued development.

I am comfortable with hand edit of XML, so Openbox was not much of a learning curve – plus I dig the dynamic menus.

I do remember the FB theme being attractive, but it took over 3 minutes to boot up with the weird ubuntu/leaf hybrid clock/logo at boot. It’s probably a footnote in terms of a distro, but at least it warrants a fond mention now and again.